Former detainee-desaparecida Nilda Eloy described her passage through six clandestine centers named the “Camps circuit” today in her testimony against Miguel Osvaldo Etchecolatz. Her story reveals the integrated system of concentration camps which functioned under Etchecolatz´s command. Testimonies were also heard from two other survivors that were imprisoned with Eloy.
LA PLATA. – A series of testimonies began today in the oral trial of Miguel Osvaldo Etchecolatz, alleged perpetrator of genocide. The first witness to testify was former detainee-desaparecida Nilda Eloy, whose kidnap and torture are currently under investigation. Eloy, who at the time of her kidnapping was 19 years old, described her illegal arrest by Etchecolatz for her involvement in a gang, as well as her subsequent passage through six clandestine detention centers which were part of the “Camps Circuit.”
Around midday, Eloy was called to the stand to narrate the horror she lived through at the hands of Etchecolatz and his right-hand man Ramón Camps, during the defendant’s time as Director of General Investigations of the Police of Buenos Aires Province.
The oppressor was not present to hear the story of his victim, as he had requested of the Court that he be excused from testimonial audiences as a result of, of course, his health. Currently, he spends his time in his chalet in the Peralta Ramos Forest in Mar del Plata, where he enjoys house arrest.
Nilda testified today that she was kidnapped the night of October 1st, 1976 by a taskforce commanded by Etchecolatz (“he gave the orders,” she specified), made up of the police officers Hugo Guallama and Francisco Ezequiel Avellaneda and ten other oppressors. Although at the time Eloy did not recognize her captors, years later she was able to identify Etchecolatz “because I saw him on the television.” Eloy identified Guallama and Avellaneda by first and last name during the Juicio por la Verdad in La Plata, where the two oppressors were recently forced to testify for other cases.
The testimony emphasized that in all of the concentration camps in which detainees were placed, the personnel which “attended” to the prisoners “were policial,” that is, they were personnel subordinate to Miguel Etchecolatz through his role as Director of Investigations. “All of these places were run in the same way, they were places directed by the police,” she assured, “and they were all in agreement as to how structured the Police were in that moment, everything depended on the Metropolitan Area, which worked in three directions: as much as in Investigations as in Intelligence and Security.”
Nilda was first moved to the clandestine center known as “La Cacha” which was run under the supervision of Lisandro Olmos, near Penal Unit No. 8. I was taken immediately to the torture chamber,” stated the witness, adding that she was subjected to sessions of electrocution, physical beating, and threatening.
“A priest they called ‘Father Manolete’ came to the center. He was the same priest which attended to the families in the Cathedral: monseñor Callejas,” remembered Eloy, “It was his job to put our hands on the ground for them to step on.”
It was there, after she had been tortured for three or four days, that Eloy was brought before Etchecolatz, who had decided to move her, together with various other prisoners, to a second destination: the Investigations Brigade in Quilmes, known as the “Pozo de Quilmes” (Well of Quilmes). During the trip, the detainees were taken from the truck carrying them and subjected to a mock firing brigade by the guards; “I don’t know if everyone returned to climb back into the truck that had gotten out.”
Eloy noted that at the “Pozo de Quilmes,” the clandestine center which also overseen by Etchecolatz, “the three floors of cells were full.”
It was there that Eloy met Emilce Moler, a witness today in Eloy’s case, who she had previously known during their time at the Bachillerato of Fine Arts. “To have someone recognize you in that moment was to return to life,” expressed the survivor. “While I was in Quilmes, I spent all of my time with a ‘supposed’ doctor, who had fingered us with Pancután,” she added.
After five days, Eloy was again moved with a group of other prisoners to the “Pozo de Arana” (Well of Arana) another of the clandestine centers which composed the “Camps circuit.” “For a moment, they were supposedly going to free us,” she recounted, “but they were calling our names from a list, and I remained until the last. Then, one of them (the oppressors) came over and told me ‘Say birdseed.’ When I had done it, he told me ‘you lose” and that they had erased my name from the list. That meant almost three years more,” remarked the witness.
“Arana was a very particular place, because they tortured very near to where the cells were,” remembered Eloy, “It went on all day long. The torture was to listen to the torture.”
A few days later, Eloy was moved from Arana with a group of nearly 30 other detainees to another clandestine center, which was known as “El Vesubio” located at the crossing of Highway Riccheri and Cintura Road (part of La Mantanza).
There Eloy met, among other prisoners, Marlene Kegler Krug, an illegal detainee from Paraguay, still disappeared today, “that had been crucified at Arana.” “She still had the marks on the palms of her hands, on her feet. She was recovering,” added Eloy.
Eloy also shared her cell with many other people, including Horacio Matoso (who will testify tomorrow as a witness for this trial). Eloy shared with him all her later destinations.
“In that place, I was beaten by someone who I later recognized in a book as (the colonel Pedro Alberto) Durán Sáenz,” she explained.
The following concentration camp Eloy was brought to was the Investigations Brigade of Lanús (with a site in Avellaneda), known as “El Infierno”: “When we were moved, they told us to watch the road, because the place to where we went, you didn’t leave again. We went to Hell, and from there you didn’t leave.”
Eloy described the cell in which the prisoners were placed, which was so small “that we took turns sitting.” She explained that the conditions, also under Etchecolatz’s direction, “were increasingly rigid.” “Every four or five days they passed us a watering hose through the peephole of the door and you had to open your mouth to drink the water, and every 12 or 15 days they gave us something solid,” she remarked. When Eloy left “El Infierno” she weighed 64 pounds.
At “El Infierno,” like in so many other of the concentration camps, the guards would remove a select group from the cells, bathe and dress them, and then, after they had been readied, assassinate the prisoners, creating the pretense of a “death in combat.”
The last clandestine detention center which Eloy was moved to was the Police Inspection Unit No.3 of Lanus, which fulfilled the role of lodging the prisoners which would be “legalized” within the “Camps circuit.” “I suppose that the police inspector that was in charge must have been impressed, because he brought a balance and weighed us,” remarked Eloy.
In Lanus, the prisoners were able to begin receiving family visitors, despite the fact that they still were not detained “legally.” “We didn’t appear anywhere, we didn’t exist,” she stated. It was there, thanks to the relatives of one of Eloy’s companions, that she was able to send word to her parents that she still lived.
“From there I was moved directly to (the penitentiary in) Devoto,” recounted the witness. Eloy remained in Devoto until the beginning of 1979, when she was placed at the disposal of the Poder Ejecutivo Nacional (National Executive Power). “To be ‘at his disposal,’” she explained, “meant that each time that there was a movement inside of the military powers, or worldwide, they took hostages from Devoto and the other jails and brought them to different camps and later returned them if nothing happened.
“That was my ‘tourism’ of the Camps circuit,” Eloy commented ironically towards the end of her testimony. “As one advanced through the circuit, from place to place, it was like you were being slowly broken down,” she remarked. All I was prepared for was to become inhuman. Not only had we lost our names, our relationship with the outside world, with the day, the hour; it was like a continuous tunnel, with every movement.”
At various times during Eloy´s testimony, when her voice broke from the strain of retelling the horror she lived through with the other prisoners, the Court offered her a pause in her testimony. To this, Eloy only responded, “I can not stop. There have been too many years of silence. I am okay. I have to be okay.”
To Etchecolatz “They did not want him because he was a thief.”
Today, the Court also heard the testimonies of two survivors of the dictatorship which shared imprisonment with Nilda Eloy in different clandestine centers, Emilce Moler, a survivor of “La Noche de los Làpices” (The Night of the Pencils) and Mercedes Borra, a former detainee-desaparecida that traveled from Formosa to give her testimony.
Moler gave the account of her kidnapping on September 16th, 1976 in La Plata, where she was first moved to the clandestine center in Arana, and later to the Investigations Brigade in Quilmes, where she encountered Nilda Eloy. Some time after, the two prisoners found each other again, this time in the Police Inspection Unit No. 3 in Lanus, the former path to “legalization.” Like Eloy, Moler was put at the disposal of the Executive National Power and moved to the penal unit in Devoto in January of 1977, where she was kept until her release in April of 1978, under a condition of “monitored freedom.” Moler was barred from remaining in La Plata, and she and her family were forced to move to Mar del Plata.
The witness informed the Court that her father was once a police inspector, but he had not wanted to work with Miguel Etchecolatz, who was known before the time of the dictatorship, when the oppressor was his subordinate. “My father did not want to work for him because he said he was a scar on the police,” she remembered. When one of the judges asked her why he had said this, she responded with conviction, “They did not want him because he was a thief.”
For his part, Mercedes Borra also spoke before the Court of his long voyage through various clandestine detention centers, beginning with his kidnapping in the federal capital of Buenos Aires. The witness recounted that he was moved to a concentration camp that was called “Proto Blanco” – named thus because it was located in the same place which later became the clandestine center known as “El Blanco” – located at the crossing of Highway Riccheri and Cintura Road, near “El Vesubio.”
Borra’s next destination was the Police Inspection Unit No. 60 of Monte Grande, another of the concentration camps which formed the “Camps circuit.” From there, Mercedes was moved to the Police Inspection Unit No. 3 in Lanus. It was there that he met Nilda Eloy and Emilce Moler. The survivor informed the Court that some time later at Lanus he was freed.
The Next Witnesses
Tomorrow will be presented the testimonies from four other survivors of concentration camps which were under the command of the oppressor Etchecolatz. Oscar Solìs, Adolfo Paz, Horacio Matoso, and Eduardo Castellanos will testify in the same manner as Nilda Eloy: They will narrate how they lived during their passage through the clandestine centers of the “Camps circuit,” in which they were imprisoned with her at different moments.
